Sunday, July 19, 2026 at 6:30 pm
Centering themes of resistance, joy, and collective liberation, this cabaret brings together music, performance, spoken word, and drag to explore what it means to resist authoritarianism in our present moment. Through works that celebrate queerness, intersectionality, authenticity, and the power of questioning accepted systems, our Resistance Cabaret invites audiences to gather in community and imagine resistance not only as protest, but as celebration.
Featuring drag artiste Miss Kitty, Lila Cooper, and the cast of Rhythms of Our Roots, this evening continues Avant Bard’s commitment to bold, politically engaged performance that interrogates the classics, challenges oppressive structures, and creates space for urgent civic conversation.
Join us Sunday, July 19, 2026 at 6:30 p.m. at The Filling Station in Arlington, VA for this special installment of the Resistance Readings series. As always, admission is FREE , but seating is limited, so guests are encouraged to reserve tickets in advance!
Food & drink will be available for purchase.
Past Resistance Readings
JUNE 2026
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, written by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Kathleen Akerley.
Avant Bard Theatre’s Resistance Readings Project continued with a staged reading of Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a darkly comic and sharply political work examining authoritarianism, censorship, and dissent. Set inside a Soviet psychiatric hospital, the play follows a political prisoner whose resistance to the state becomes inseparable from questions of sanity, truth, and personal freedom. This special presentation was performed sans music and followed by a conversation with the artists.
MAY 2026
Film Screenings & Conversation with Longacre Lea
The Infection, She Speaks to Trees and The Doors of Impression
Avant Bard Theatre’s Resistance Readings Project presented an evening of film, conversation, and community featuring a screening of The Infection, a film by Longacre Lea, alongside bonus screenings of She Speaks to Trees and The Doors of Impression. Following the screenings, Longacre Lea Artistic Director and Avant Bard Artistic Associate Kathleen Akerley led a conversation with the audience reflecting on the films, the artistic process behind them, and the role of experimental performance in moments of cultural and political uncertainty.
APRIL 2026
Songs & Stories of Immigration
Music and storytelling with Elena La Fulana and an encore performance of The Lady Bird of Saint John by La Pluma Theatre.
The evening brought together music, storytelling, and conversation centered on immigration, identity, and family. Audiences experienced a moving performance by Elena La Fulana, whose bilingual folk and Latin-inspired music reflected themes of memory, displacement, and belonging. The event also featured an encore presentation of The Lady Bird of Saint John by La Pluma Theatre, an intimate and emotionally charged play following two sisters reunited after years apart. Through music and theatre, the program explored the personal realities behind immigration and the lasting impact of separation across borders.
MARCH 2026
Singing & Screening Resistance
Singing Resistance with Katelyn Kyser and a screening of Red Flag of the Future.
Katelyn Kyser is a performer, music teacher, and song leader from Arlington. She began her career as an professional oboist – receiving a master’s degree and artist diploma from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and then moving to Bosnia and Herzegovina to play principal oboe in the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra. She’s traveled the world to learn from song leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina, South Africa, and the country of Georgia. Seeing the ways people use music for peacebuilding and reconciliation has inspired her to bring these traditions back to the United States. She now works as an Arlington public school music teacher and as a community song leader. She sings and leads songs in an effort to build community and share the message of love, joy, connection, and resistance.
Red Flag of the Future is a new opera based on Laura Schlachtmeyer’s translation of Ernst Toller’s Masse-Mensch (1919). Examining the play’s history reveals why a tale of human dignity and revolution that global audiences found compelling in the 1920s feels viscerally immediate in our own moment.
FEBRUARY 2026
New Works & Music Inspired by The Two Gentlemen of Verona
A Collaboration with DC Bushwick Book Club
The DC Bushwick Book Club collaborated with Avant Bard to present new works and music inspired by The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The evening included a sneak peak of two original songs of resistance from Avant Bard’s March production of The Two Gentlemen of Killarney, adapted and directed by Seamus Miller.
JANUARY 2026
Ionesco’s Rhinoceros
Adapted by Tyler Herman
Rhinoceros follows an ordinary person watching, one by one, as everyone around them transforms into rhinoceroses—a comic and unsettling metaphor rooted in the rise of fascism in 1930s Romania. This adaptation stages the many forms of ideological conformity that continue to threaten democracy and the rule of law.
DECEMBER 2025
The Deplorable
By Séamus Miller
The Deplorable is a history play for the present. Episodes (both real and imagined) from the American Revolution and Civil War collide with actual congressional testimony from four police officers in the aftermath of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.